“De Aqua” Voynich theory on YouTube…

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Following six years of arduous research, an unnamed 44-year-old German industrial technician has been trying (unsuccessfully) since 2005 to get his/her Voynich theory “De Aqua” published, either as a book or as an article. Frustrated by the lack of progress, last month he/she placed thirty-three sizeable chunks of it onto YouTube.

Of course, I fully understand that a busy person like you can’t really spare the time to trawl through several hours of German-text video presentation. So, to save you the bother, I’ve compiled a great big list of all highlights as seen from my chair [though here’s the final part (#33), which is a visual montage of all the interesting claims from the first 32 parts].

(1) Part #1 sets off with the basic format we’ll see throughout – endless pages of (almost entirely) German text fading in and out on a coloured background. Firstly, the top-level description of the theory gets presented: that the Voynich is actually entitled “De Aqua” (i.e. “concerning water“) and that the EVA transcription “otork” somehow translates as “aqua”. It then lists page after page of late-medieval things related to water. Part #2 asserts the author’s historical conclusions – that the VMs was written between 1525 and 1608 by four authors (in four writing systems), and that the underlying plaintext is German & Italian – before outlining the VMs’ known provenance since then.

(2) Part #3 is a bit of a scattergun attack on the 16th and early 17th centuries, with Kepler, Dee, Kelly, Paracelsus, Sir Francis Drake, Nostradamus, Isabella Cortese (who probably didn’t exist, incidentally), German mathematician Adam Ries, the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books, etc etc all name-dropped in quick succession. Part #4 (only three minutes long, most of the others are closer to ten minutes each) links the three red shapes on f1r to (a) “Astrologie / Astronomie“, (b) “Fauna / Flora“, and (c) “Medizin“. No proof, no evidence, just presented as fact.

(3) Part #5 begins a lengthy discussion of medieval herbals, concluding that f2r depicts Lactuca virosa, f3r depicts a Spanish pepper, that f4v depicts an aubergine (i.e. that the VMs must post-date 1500). Part #6 continues in the same vein, while Part #7 argues that f33v depicts maize (which is where the claimed earliest date of 1525 comes in). Part #8 is broadly similar, lots more of the same.

(4) Part #9 has some nice pictures of things resembling the jars in the pharmacological section (though I couldn’t see references or dates for these?), as well as lots of parallels for details, including a nice little dragon (was this from the same Paris manuscript Sergio Toresella once mentioned?). Part #10 has many more parallels (including the famous “armadillo” [hah!] and the Novara coat of arms, etc), as does Part #11 which again returns to the VMs’ f25v dragon.

(5) Part #12 goes off the rails a bit, with claimed resemblances to body parts; Part #13 covers menstruation and the spongum somniferum (for which Caterina Sforza included a recipe, as I recall), though I can’t make out the yellow annotations to the marginalia on f66r (2:41 into the video); while Part #14 reads f77r as depicting the four elements.

(6) Part #15 gets back on track with astronomical parallels; Part #16 looks closely at the rather strange page f67v2 and proposes that the corner shapes are actually constellations (such as Pegasus); Part #17 goes off on a fairly pointless Giordano Bruno tangent; Part #18 looks at the zodiac pages (including a little discussion on the month names); Part #19 focuses mainly on the month names such as the Leo page (because of its Germanic-looking “augst” month name), though it beats me what Al Pacino is doing in there (4:02). 😮

(7) Part #20 looks at crowns and golden fleeces; Part #21 goes back to the zodiac nymphs, looking more at the structure of the pages, before moving on to discuss the 15th century “De Sphaera” by the deaf Milanese illustrator Cristoforo de Predis, who worked for the Sforza family (ah, them again).

(8) Part #22 (are you still reading this? Just checking!) compares the drawings in Quire 13 with Roman aqueducts and similar water structures; while Part #23 looks at Leonardo da Vinci’s take on water, compares (at 1:21) a detail on f79r with a sextant (Rich SantaColoma recently blogged that the same detail reminded him of early “swimming girdles”, though I suspect neither have it right), and discusses rainbows too. Part #24 discusses water nymph details (poses, rings, cross, horseshoe, spinning top, nail, etc).

(9) Part #25 focuses (rather unsatisfactorily, it has to be said) on various tenuous links with alchemy, with the only high point being the comparison between the balneo section’s “giant grapes” page (f83v) and a page in Das Buch der waren Kunst zu distillieren (1512).

(10) Part #26 is pretty thin apart from a fascinating parallel (0:53) between a detail of f76v and a drawing of Mercurius in Liber II of Giordano Bruno’s (1591) De Imaginum Compositione; Part #27 is even thinner; while Part #28 proposes that the nine-rosette page is a map of Italy with Venice in the middle (yes, I’d say) and Pompeii in the top left (no, as it was only rediscovered in 1748). [I’m not convinced by Valdarno and the Wasserturm, either.]

(11) Part #29 (Perfume and Plague) didn’t really work for me at all; while Part #30 (Hidden Characters in the Manuscript) only briefly gets interesting when looking (1:53) at similarities between our beloved MS408 and Medeltidshandskrift 47 (at Lund University in Sweden) – the discussion of the f17r and f116v marginalia seems superficial and unconvincing to me.

(12) Finally, in Part #31, our anonymous author gets to the point of his whole book – that (unless I’ve misunderstood him/her, which is always possible) some clever computer programmer out there should be able to make use of all the clever cribs he/she has amassed as a result of his/her long journey into the heart of the VMs’ pictures. Part #32 has his/her (fairly diffuse, it has to be said) bibliography; and Part #33, as mentioned above, is a sequential montage of all the visual identifications proposed in parts 1 to 32.

Quite why neither of the German Voynich E-bloggers (hi Elmar, hi Elias) has yet blogged about this I don’t know (perhaps they’re on holiday?): but from where I’m sitting in the UK, there’s plenty to say about it.

Firstly, it is pretty clear that the author has for some years sustained an intense (and independent-minded) assault on the VMs’ pictures – yet at the same time he/she seems quite unaware of many long-running problematic debates, such as the whole “heavy painter” issue. Had the plant on f4v not been overpainted blue, would his/her identification with “aubergine” have been so clear-cut?

In addition, while it’s fantastic to see someone wise to hidden details (such as the concealed people in f86v4, even though this is mislabelled as f68v4 in Part#7), overall I just don’t accept the idea that the VMs’ plants can be identified as solidly as he/she thinks – we’ve now had three or four generations of herbal researchers look at it, with each finding it bewildering in a new way. Furthermore, comparing drawings with modern plants (or even with interpretative drawings of modern plants) is of little use, as virtually every plant you can name has been extensively adapted and altered over the centuries by, ummm, cunning breeders.

While I’m sympathetic to the author’s project and research programme (it is, after all, more or less identical in intention to what I was trying to do with my own “The Curse of the Voynich”), where it falls down is in historical methodology: in this instance, you just can’t get the level of proof you would like from visual similarities, however many of them you try to amass. Has our unnamed author provided coherent and powerful evidence supporting the identification of MS408 as “De Aqua“? I don’t really think so – plants aside, the overwhelming bulk of the discussion is fairly lightweight, and does not gain any real traction on the real history of the manuscript despite the sheer mass of intertextual references.

All the same, there’s plenty of food for thought here (though I wish many of the manuscripts where so many of the nice illustrations were taken from had MS and page references to back them up) – but for all “WilfridVoynich“‘s hard work, the end result simply fails to produce the set of cribs he/she was aiming for. Sorry, but it’s not “De Aqua” as claimed (though, to be honest, I would be hugely unsurprised if the vertical column of letters on f76r does indeed somehow encipher “de aqua”).

The end result, though, is plainly a great personal achievement – and I would be delighted if some of the intriguing and bold visual connections he/she has drawn in it ultimately lead onwards to genuinely productive and useful future research within the overall VMs community. For all its faults and limitations, this is definitely the (virtual) Voynich book of the year for 2009! 😉

Hungarian Voynich summer camp…!?

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I picked up on this a few weeks ago, but thought that the combination of Google Translate and my screen-weary eyes was somehow deceiving me – for who on earth would be interested in going along to a week-long Voynich summer camp in a sparsely-furnished flat in Budapest [site in Hungarian]? The site had to be some kind of prop for an Hungarian RPG, surely?

However, it turns out that (despite the slightly jarring pen-name “Hartree-Fock Cares”) this is no joke, and is actually starting very shortly (Monday 24th August 2009). After I left a brief comment on the site just now, Miklos Vincze enthusiastically replied on behalf of the “organizing committee”:-

About the camp: This is an amateaur, self-organizing little summer school, with a few enthusiastic MA, MSc and Grad school students, and even postgrads – linguists, coders, physicists, who decided to spend a week with some research on this manuscript, just for the fun of it. For this purpose we rented a flat right in the middle of Budapest, which we will occupy permanently for a week, starting with the evening of August 24. We are planning to do some projects based mostly on word structures and on various properties of word distributions in the text. Also we would like to identify some of the plants as well, with the help of one of Hungary’s leading herbarists. I myself will try to expand Landini’s work on the autocorrelation patterns in the manuscript, and compare it with different types of medieval texts. And we will work on a plenty of projects like this in our little summer school.

Sadly, all the cheap EasyJet seats between London and Budapest were snapped up long ago, so it would be a bit pricy to fly over for the day (however tempting, particularly as I like Budapest so much): but I’ve offered to do one or two Instant Messaging Voynich Q&A sessions for them during the week, as that seems like a nice compromise. As Barry Norman used to say, “and why not?”

If any other Voynich experts reading this would like to donate an hour of their time for some similar IM-based Voynichological Q&A, I’m sure our Hungarian chums would be similarly delighted at the offer. Who knows, we might also even find some way of squeezing in some international Voynich IM’ing at the pub meet on Sunday. 🙂

Jaume Deydier’s “livre de raison”…

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Though I have a good-sized review of James Amelang’s fascinating book “The Flight of Icarus” in the pipeline, I couldn’t resist posting about one tiny Provençal / Occitan item that popped up there…

One of the many mysteries sustaining the Voynich Manuscript mythology is something which you’d have thought would be easy to sort out: a set of month names apparently added by a later owner to what VMs researchers call the “zodiac pages”. Here’s a set of annotated images I made of them a few years ago (which I ought to move over to this site soon), together with an explanation of why I think these are written in some form of Occitan.

When in 1997 Jorge Stolfi had much the same thought, he asked some Occitan researchers if they had any 15th-16th century texts with month names in: even though there are almost no such extant texts (because official documents were all written in French or Latin, while Occitan itself was in sharp decline), the closest match produced by this was from 15th century Toulon. Hence, for years I’ve wondered… what document was that, then?

Well… it looks like it’s listed in James Amelang’s book (p.281) – the bourgeous farmer Jaume Deydier from Ollioules (Var) near Toulon, who wrote his livre de raison (family chronicle) between 1477 and 1521. Helpfully, Amelang lists some page references (40-42, 230, 250-251) in Charles de Ribbe’s (1879) Les familles et la société en France avant la Révolution. Deydier’s first entry begins: “En nom de Nostre Senhor Dieu Jésus-Christ, et de la siena gloriosa Mayre, et de la sancta Cori ce-restial de Paradis, invocant loqual in tota bona et perfiecha obra si deu invocar, car del processis tout ben, nobilitat et profiech, Estament de mi, Jaume Deydier, natiff de Tholon, aras abitant en aquest present luoc d’Olliol.”

Digging deeper, de Ribbe’s (1898) La société provençale à la fin du moyen âge: d’après des documents inédits‎ has more on Deydier. For example, pp.453-454 has an extract from Deydier’s 1521 will, beginning: “Per memoria als successors de mi Jaume Deydier, expressamen à Jacques, mon obeyssant fils.”

Rather more recently than de Ribbe, there’s a 54-page book/article by Paul (or Gustave?) Roux titled Le Livre de raison de Jaume Deydier: un document d’une grande importance pour la Provence (1983), which appears to be an offprint from ‎Bulletin de la société des amis du vieux Toulon et de sa région, n°105‎.

All the same, you should be aware that there is a sizeable (if somewhat isolated?) French-language literature on the whole livre de raison genre, of which Deydier’s chronicle is merely one example. For example, if you go through this 2002 paper by Jean Tricard, you’ll find a decent-length literature list (Note 1). Tricard also comments (Note 5) that although de Ribbe launched the study of this genre, this was “pas toujours avec la plus grande rigueur scientifique d’ailleurs“, which I’m sure you can translate for yourself. 🙂

So – finally – back to the month names. Throughout all the fragmentary quotations from Deydier on the web, the only Provençal / Occitan month name I’ve found mentioned is “Septembre” (which is good, but which we knew anyway): however, without any idea of Deydier’s orthography etc, it’s a bit hard to tie this down any further.

Incidentally, Amelang cautions that many early modern popular / artisan historical autobiographical texts (the subject of his book) suffer both from a lack of a critical edition and from ‘selective’ (if not blatantly misleading) early translations: and so it is hard to be sure what we would find were we to look at Deydier’s chronicle for ourselves. Hence you might reasonably ask: is there a facsimile edition (or scans) out there of Deydier’s livre? Almost certainly not. Do I even have any idea of which library or collection holds Deydier’s original ms yet? No.

Even so, knowing what we don’t know is probably a (tiny) step in broadly the right direction.

Cipher Mysteries London pub meet…

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The day: Sunday 30th August 2009
The time: 5pm (or thereabouts)
The place: The Seven Stars, 53-54 Carey Street, Holborn, London WC2A 2JB
Nearest Tubes: Temple, Chancery Lane, Holborn
The purpose: convivial cipher history / mystery chat over a pint or two.

Please leave a comment if you’re planning to come! Looking forward to seeing you there…

PS: if it turns out to be too small or too dark, Plan B is to decamp to the Wetherspoons down the road. 🙂

PPS: please say if you happen to know Middlesex-based Voynich researcher Peter Mason’s phone number – he hoped to come along but I’ve managed to, ummm, tidy away his contact details. 😮  Thanks!

“Statistics can help decode VMs” shocker…

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Today’s New Scientist brings with it the vastly uninformative claim that…

“A STATISTICAL method that picks out the most significant words in a book could help scholars decode ancient texts like the Voynich manuscript – or even messages from aliens.”

True, it “could” – but you have to say that the overwhelming probability is that it (just like most other methods before it) will fall flat on its hairy statistical arse when applied to truly difficult things. And what are the real chances we’d be able to decode a putative alien language based purely on some statistician’s semantic say-so? Practically nil, I confidently predict: come on, people – decode dolphin language first and we’ll be convinced you’re onto something. (Hint: it has 200 words for “tasty” and 600 words for “fish”).

Honestly, statisticians like these simply don’t ‘get’ the Voynich Manuscript at all – they misread the EVA transcription (for example) as a regular, smooth surface for analysis, while completely failing to see that the VMs is an object that has been constructed to mislead, not to communicate.

As Alfred Korzybski noted long ago (but few now bother to consider), “the map is not the territory“. *sigh*

“Old Latin” Voynich theory…

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Here’s a 2009 Voynich theory for me to add to the big list, courtesy of George Hoschel Jr (of California?). George uploaded his solution as a jpeg’ed scan of his transliteration notes (1) followed by four annotated versions of parts of f80v (2, 3, 4, 5): the basic idea is that Voynichese enciphers what he calls “Old Latin”.

Just so you know, George reads Voynichese as a combination of simple letters (a = EVA a , e = EVA e, o/u = EVA o, m = EVA iii, n = EVA ii, z = EVA q, etc) with a lot of plausible-looking specific abbreviations (er = EVA ch, fr = EVA sh, eri = EVA sh [but with the plume offset to the right], eric = EVA she [which George reads as short for ericius, “hedgehog”], and so forth).

Put it all together, and you get a translation of f80v that reads like:

WINE STRONG DRY TO MAGPIE
SAVED CRUMBLED DRIED TO HOOPOE KIDNEY
TO BOILED KIDNEY FRIED / IN
GOAT VEGETABLE BREAD USING
USING HEDGEHOG KIDNEY TO BREAD

In some ways, to me this reads like “Ready Steady Cook” as directed by Tim Burton – “right, teams, you have 30 minutes to produce a restaurant-quality meal using only hoopoe kidney, goat, vegetables, bread, and strong wine.” Feel free to interpret this in quite a different way!

The “Tamam Shud” cipher mystery…

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Here’s a historical cipher mystery from 1948 that I found out about yesterday (apologies for being so slow on the uptake). It’s a thoroughly perplexing affair from Australia, with an anonymous corpse that ended up embalmed, lots of red herrings (all deliberate, it would seem), a fragment from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (“Tamam Shud”, after which the whole case is known) hidden in a secret pocket, and a short piece of apparently ciphered text:-

MRGOABABD
MLIAOI
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

As is clearly visible from the hi-res scan of the note, the second line is crossed through: to me, this makes it look as though the fourth line [MLIABO…] is a corrected version of the deleted second line [MLIAOI], perhaps where the “B” was omitted.

Any passing pen-and-paper code-breakers (particularly the hairier ones, naming no names *cough* Tony Gaffney) would immediately note a number of stand-out features:

  • The “AB” letter-pair appears four times in the message
  • IA appears at least twice
  • “(I)TT(M)T” occurs in the last line (suggesting that ciphertext T <=> plaintext E, hmmm?)
  • Several reversed letter-pairs (ST/TS, AI/IA, TM/MT) appear in the message
  • The quality of writing appears semi-literate rather than hyper-literate

I suspect that these largely rule out any sophisticated cipher system: so what we are looking at here is probably a simple monoalphabetic cipher, and one probably executed by a fairly inept code-maker (i.e. with errors).

Since March 2009, a team from the University of Adelaide led by Professor Derek Abbott (who presumably felt compelled to try to work out whether or not to add the affair to his list of “imponderable” questions) has apparently set out to solve this whole mystery. But should the cipher get cracked, the sorry rationale behind it all would probably become painfully obvious. (For what it’s worth, my guess is that it’s some kind of botched suicide note to a lover, that would need to be both private and public at the same time.)

So, all you historical code-breakers out there, what are you waiting for? Get cracking! 🙂

“I Am Darknesse” Voynich story…

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Here’s a Voynich Manuscript short story to sustain you through those long dark Northern hemisphere summer months (you know, that time when you have lots of things to do outside that don’t involve endlessly surfing the ‘net).

It’s called “I Am Darknesse” by Jez Thorpe, and is a fairly enjoyable stab at a drug-tastic horror-trip take on the VMs’ dark secrets. Sure, his characters are a bit cartoony and thin: but it’s nicely written, and (apart from a  “Frank Newbold” gaffe) manages to get the VMs side of things pretty much straight.

Just so you know, Jez is 36, married, lives near Cambridge, has taken at least one Creative Writing course, and recently found himself unemployed.

Voynich xkcd Wikirank spike…

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I mentioned a few days ago that Google Trends showed a huge surge in searches for “voynich” triggered by the xkcd webcomic’s Voynich theory gag. While I guessed that the spike was over 50x baseline, I wondered to myself whether there was a reliable way of accessing accurate hit statistics on Wikipedia pages, because that would be a pretty nice graph to see.

Well… it turns out (thanks to a post today from the Feral Graphing blog) that there is precisely such a thing: Wikirank. This shows that the Wikipedia VMs page got 68631 hits on 5th June 2009, compared to a normal daily average of (say) 1000 or so, so a roughly 68x spike.

OK, it’s not hugely important, but it’s a nice resource to know about. 🙂

Wikipedia, XKCD and the Voynich Manuscript…

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One of Google’s more interesting experimental engines is Google Trends: this aggregates data on keyword searches, to let you compare the relative popularity of different keywords over time: for example, “Paris Hilton” and “Star Wars” are (Google-wise) just about as popular as each other. From the graph, you can see that interest in Star Wars spiked up in May 2005, which Google guesses (correctly) was from the Star Wars film opening: while the Paris Hilton volume spiked somewhat when she left jail in June 2007. This reveals other non-obvious search aspects, such as the apparent cargo cult worship of Ms Hilton in Indonesia and Mexico. 🙂

But I digress.

For the graph for “Voynich”, Google Trends’ algorithms gamely suggest to the SciAm 2008 online re-release of Gordon Rugg’s 2004 article (marked “[A]”) as a possible cause of Voynich interest (but this is plainly wrong). The twin peaks actually correspond (a) to a surge in Voynich interest in France caused by Jean-Claude Gawsewitch’s (2005) “Le Code Voynich”, and (b) to the (2009) Voynich gag in webcomic XKCD.

google-trends-voynich

If we look solely at the June 2009 numbers, the scale of the XKCD peak is even clearer: Google search traffic for “Voynich” apparently spiked by more than 50x over baseline traffic levels. Whoosh.

google-trends-voynich-June-2009

This massive XKCD spike is what lies behind the battle raging in the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript Talk page. On the one hand, you have Wikipedia editors who think the Voynich page is basically OK (yes, there used to be a section on VMs in popular culture, but it got culled over a year ago) – and on the other, you have an army of vociferous XKCD fans who think that there should be at least some mention of XKCD squeezed in there, surely?

I think it’s important to point out that neither side is entirely blameless in this dispute. Wikipedia editors deliberately use its neutral voice and juxtaposing header templates as a way of fusing (achingly) high and (shudderingly) low cultural references together under a banner of supposed universality: though this syncretism helps to differentiate it (as a project) from traditional encyclopaedias, nobody involved is quite sure whether ultimately to privilege high or low culture – both are important at different times and for different reasons.

Similarly, the XKCD fanbase (which seems centred on Seattle, according to Google Trends?) has done itself no favours by the large number of inane troll-like edits attempted on the Voynich page. And none of them has so far really explained (in the Discussion page) why it is they collectively feel the urge to stitch XKCD’s web of cultural referentiality into Wikipedia’s fabric. From the outside, it certainly looks like a kind of drive-past L337 grafitti being daubed on Wikipedia’s walls: if there is a genuine point to the whole activity, I’ve yet to find it.

Ultimately, I suspect that the basic problem is that there is no consistently useful dividing line between high and low culture: when you have Wikipedia pages on Immanuel Kant and Brian Cant (and every silly cant inbetween), who’s to say where to draw it?

Finally, a brief Wikipedia aside. A fair while ago, someone (I’m pretty sure it was “Syzygy”, Elmar Vogt’s Wikipedia editor nom-de-plume) very kindly added a mention of my ‘Averlino’ theory to the Wikipedia Voynich page. I’m pleased that it is mentioned there, because – unlike a lot of theories – I did try hard to produce a working hypothesis consistent with the facts, rather than blatantly defying them (which seems to be the norm some days, sadly). Even if you happen to disagree with it, it does at least have the merit of pointing towards a sensible template: I’m quite sure that, if not Averlino, the real author will turn out to be remarkably similar.

Yet Elmar’s description of my theory wasn’t hugely accurate: and so I thought I ought to take the opportunity to correct and update the final two sentences. Just in case anyone is tempted to revert the changes, here are links to the research I’ve published since “The Curse of the Voynich” to back it up:-

If Pelling is right, then the manuscript is enciphered with an extremely convoluted cascade of methods, mixed together to make the resulting cipher text appear to have the properties of an unknown medieval language (such as consonant-vowel pairing, folio references, etc).

I discussed this archaic language covertext in more detail in this recent blog post. And also:-

He claims most of the non-zodiac marginalia were originally added by the document’s author(s), but have ended up unreadable because of incorrectly-guessed alterations superimposed by multiple later owners.

Recent posts on the mystery of the VMs’ unreadable marginalia (for why should they be unreadable, given that marginalia are normally added to explain or remind?) are here and here: but most of the discussion is still relatively unchanged since The Curse.